Hyundai launched the all-new second-generation Santro on the 23rd of October, 2018. The most affordable car in Hyundai’s India lineup, the Santro good a good response from the customers but the demand has slowed down since the past few months. To boost sales and get more buyers interested in the Santro, Hyundai has reshuffled the variant lineup and added a number of features to the car. A leaked image by MyCarhelpline shows the various changes made to the lineup apart from the addition of new features. For starters, the Era variant has been discontinued.
The base D-Lite variant has been given a new name and is now called Era Executive. It comes equipped with front power windows, air-conditioning, body coloured front bumper and dual-tone rear bumper. Note that the D-Lite variant on sale till now didn’t come with many basic features like air conditioning among others. As already mentioned, the Era variant seems to be discontinued here on and the new base variant is the Era executive.
Moving on, the Magna Petrol Manual and Magna CNG variants now come with a 2-DIN audio system with USB and Bluetooth connectivity, front speakers, micro antenna and steering mounted audio and Bluetooth controls. All these make it a more compelling package as the Santro has been feeling the heat from the Maruti Suzuki WagonR and the Tata Tiago among others.
Talking about the Sportz AMT variant, it now comes with a passenger side airbag, seat belt pre-tensioners for front seats and a rearview camera. However, the manual gearbox equipped Sportz variant does not get any of these updates, which is a bit of a bummer for those going for the manual variant. Also, no changes have been made to the Sportz, Sportz CNG, Magna AMT and Asta variants.
Talking about the engine powering the Santro, Hyundai used a re-worked version of the 1.1-litre four-cylinder petrol engine in the Santro. This engine is available in petrol and bi-fuel version, which can run on CNG too. The petrol powered engine produces a maximum of 68 Bhp of power and 99 Nm of torque. It gets a 5-speed manual or AMT automatic transmission. The AMT is not available with the CNG variants though. The Hyundai Santro with its 1.1-litre petrol engine returns an ARAI certified fuel efficiency score of 20.3 km/l, which is on par with the rest of the competition.
With these updates and variant reshuffle, the prices of the Santro will go up for sure. Expect a bump of around Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 20,000 on the variants where features have been added. This also means that the start price of the Santro will now cross the Rs. 4 lakh mark. It remains to be seen now if these updates enhance the Santro’s sales or not.